Besides these four core exams, you’ll need to pass one
Win2K design exam and two electives—a total of seven grueling
tests—to earn your Win2K MCSE. Don’t kid yourself, this
is not an easy process.

Self Test Exam Interface

As I went through the Self Test practice exams, I was
appalled to find that the testing engine was a 16-bit
program and was even more perturbed when the program kept
freezing while I took an exam. With a 32-bit program,
the testing engine could be multithreaded, and it wouldn’t
crash or be crashed by 16-bit programs running on the
same computer.

I installed the Self Test exam on a Pentium machine running
Win2K Advanced Server, which allowed me to switch between
the test and OS to verify answers—a setup I’m sure many
prospective MCPs will want to emulate. Note that you can
run only one instance of the testing engine at a time,
so you can’t load multiple exams simultaneously.

When you start the test engine, you choose your exam
and are then presented with a breakdown of sections by
exam objective. You can choose to answer all of the questions
or a subset (based on a specific objective). Self Test
has an option for configuring an exam for adaptive mode,
but it doesn’t appear to emulate the functionality of
a real adaptive exam. With this option you can, for example,
review previous questions—something that an actual adaptive
exam won’t allow.

As you progress through a Self Test practice exam, you
have the option of checking the correct answer, by pressing
the “Learn Now” button, before moving to the next question.
The correct answer or answers are highlighted, and a dialog
box explaining the correct and incorrect answers pops
up. This, I found, is the testing engine’s most useful
feature.

Besides the standard multiple-choice questions, the Self
Test exams feature various “Hot Spot Graphics” questions.
Here, you click an area of a graphic as the answer to
a question. You’ll also find several “Select and Place”
questions, similar to ones you’ll see on the actual Win2K
exams, where you drag objects to an area of a graphic
as you remedy a problem described in the test scenario.

Exam Content Quality

For the most part, I found Self Test’s technical content
to be accurate and the questions structured in a way conducive
to knowledge building. But I also found some questions
ambiguous and some technically inaccurate. Note that there
are enough questions in each exam pool to keep you from
revisiting the same questions. This prevents you from
memorizing specific questions when taking a practice exam
multiple times.

The question explanations are adequate; still, they could
use some work. For example, while many Windows NT 4.0
MCPs are familiar with the concept of setting scheduling
priorities for a process, most aren’t up to speed on the
intricacies of new technologies incorporated into Win2K
such as Group Policy, IPSec, Certificate Services, and
Active Directory. More in-depth explanations of how these
specific technologies work would help prospective test
takers maximize the Self Test product. At the same time,
the explanations do point you to reference materials such
as Microsoft Press’ study guides, TechNet, and the Windows
resource kits—but not all users will have access to these
materials.

I did find one big content detractor in the Self Test
materials: You’re tested on Resource Kit utilities, something
you won’t be tested on in the real exams. These questions
are unnecessary and should be removed from the question
pool. They serve only to confuse individuals who are using
the Self Test product for exam objective preparation.

Now, let’s take a detailed look at two Self Test practice
exam questions.

The question in Figure 1 is ambiguous.

Figure 1. This permissions and
inheritance question can be considered ambiguous.
(Click image to view larger version.)

You’ve created a no-name Organizational Unit (OU) with
a child OU named ENGUSERS. You must assign explicit permissions
to the child OU (I assume this means ENGUSERS). The second
requirement is that you must allow permissions to inherit
from parent to child, but from what parent? It isn’t clear
whether the permissions should be allowed to inherit from
the no-name parent or from ENGUSERS (as a parent). In
addition, the question says nothing about blocking permissions
at any level. Active Directory object inheritance allows
you to assign explicit permissions to an object and have
these permissions inherit to all the child objects below.
Assigning explicit permissions to an object doesn’t preclude
that object from receiving inherited permissions from
its parent and then passing these inherited permissions
down to its children. As an analogy, if your kids inherit
your green eyes, they can still inherit their grandmother’s
red hair, even though you as their father or mother may
have blond hair.

According to the practice test, the correct answers are,
“Configure permissions inheritance on the OU and all child
objects,” and, “On the child object with explicit rights,
use the Security tab and clear the checkbox to Allow Inheritable
Permissions from Parent to Propagate to This Object.”
As you can see, this question is highly ambiguous and
open to discussion.

A user is moved from one OU to another OU in the same
domain, and in the process loses access to a vital folder.
The question’s answer (marked “A”) states that the user
lost access because her old OU, and not her user account,
was assigned explicit permissions to the folder. The explanation
states that an Organizational Unit can be assigned permissions
to a folder and that all users in that OU gain access
to that folder by virtue of being a member of the OU.
This isn’t correct. The only Active Directory objects
that can be assigned permissions to a resource are computers,
users, and groups (security groups, not distribution groups).
By definition, these are “Security Principals.” An Organizational
Unit isn’t a security principal. Rather, it’s a container
object used to organize other Active Directory objects
for the purpose of delegating administrative tasks or
applying group policy.

Final Thoughts

Self Test Software has a good product that I find useful
for exam preparation. Still, the product could be improved
by implementing a 32-bit testing engine, providing more
detailed technical explanations to questions, and fixing
some technical inaccuracies. Overall, though, the Self
Test Win2K practice exams are solid. Coupled with hands-on
Win2K experience, Self Test can help you achieve your
certification goals.

About the Author

James Carrion, MCM R2 Directory, MCITP, MCSE, MCT, CCNA, CISSP has worked as a computer consultant and technical instructor for the past 16 years. He’s the owner of and principal instructor for MountainView Systems, LLC, which specializes in accelerated Microsoft Certification training.